The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F_ck

permission to finally live. And perhaps the worst moment of
my life was also the most transformational.
Death scares us. And because it scares us, we avoid
thinking about it, talking about it, sometimes even
acknowledging it, even when it’s happening to someone
close to us.
Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by
which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured.
Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all
experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.
Something Beyond Our Selves
Ernest Becker was an academic outcast. In 1960, he got his
Ph.D. in anthropology; his doctoral research compared the
unlikely and unconventional practices of Zen Buddhism and
psychoanalysis. At the time, Zen was seen as something for
hippies and drug addicts, and Freudian psychoanalysis was
considered a quack form of psychology left over from the
Stone Age.
In his first job as an assistant professor, Becker quickly
fell into a crowd that denounced the practice of psychiatry
as a form of fascism. They saw the practice as an
unscientific form of oppression against the weak and
helpless.
The problem was that Becker’s boss was a psychiatrist.
So it was kind of like walking into your first job and proudly
comparing your boss to Hitler.
As you can imagine, he was fired.
So Becker took his radical ideas somewhere that they
might be accepted: Berkeley, California. But this, too, didn’t
last long.
Because it wasn’t just his anti-establishment tendencies
that got Becker into trouble; it was his odd teaching
methods as well. He would use Shakespeare to teach
psychology, psychology textbooks to teach anthropology,